It's a common failing among guys who want to be Men to overcompensate on being serious. They figure if they're always serious, it will make them look more impressive and keep people from noticing how goofy they actually are. Al Gore, for example. Al hasn't willingly cracked a joke in more than 40 years.
The problem with this is, very few things in life are actually serious ... or at least, they're not as serious as they seem to be. For example, consider my friend Mark. I've known Mark for several years, and he's always been a fairly easygoing kind of guy. Levelheaded. Last year, Mark was on his way to buy a lottery ticket when he got a call on his cell phone -- his parents, who were retired and taking their dream vacation (a month in Tunisia), had just been killed in a freak (and highly tragic) camel-spitting accident.
Mark was naturally stunned, and he basically stumbled into the Kwik-E-Mart in a daze and purchased his lottery ticket. That night, still in a state of disbelief over the death of his parents, Mark watched the lottery drawing on television, and realized he'd won - his ticket was worth $28 million! His emotions in turmoil, Mark sat down with the ticket in his hand, wondering over the bittersweet nature of life. As he sat there, his 15-year-old dachsund, Lulubelle, his constant companion through thick and thin, wandered over and began licking his hand, and somehow she got the ticket in her mouth and chewed it up before Mark realized what she was doing. $28 million dollars, chewed to bits by his dog. To put the capper on the day, Lulubelle choked on the shreds of the ticket and died.
I saw Mark a couple of days later, and his demeanor was the same as ever. "Mark!" I said. "How in the world are you holding up? I can't imagine what you've gone through!"
"I'm fine," he said, smiling his trademark smile. "Life's hard sometimes, but the sun always rises the next day. Regardless of how badly things go, I can always find joy in the simple things, like newly bloomed roses or the glint of sun on the lake."
That's when we realized Mark was clinically insane, and had him committed. I mean, come ON! You lose your parents, your dog, and $28 million in one day, and you're still finding joy in freakin' ROSES?!
So clearly there are some things we should take seriously. But for every thing like that, there are approximately 4,193,328 things that AREN'T serious, and the wise Man recognizes these things for what they are.
Here's a real-life example I experienced. When I was in college waaaay back in 1987 (Samford University! Go Bulldogs!), I was a DJ at our campus radio station. Now, I'm sure when you read the phrase "college radio station" you picture something along the lines of WKRP in Cincinnati but with more drugs and alcohol. That's not how things were at Samford, which is a Baptist university in Alabama. For one thing, our campus radio station was the only one in the history of the universe that played: jazz.
That's right - while other college radio stations were playing songs from REM, Midnight Oil, U2, and similar bands, Samford's station (WVSU - "the Voice of Samford University") featured the mellow sounds of Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. As you can imagine, the number of listeners on campus was approximately zero, and there were maybe a thousand in the surrounding communities who might tune us in if they desperately needed to go to sleep.
So we weren't exactly a wild-and-crazy bunch of DJs. Our primary job was to play three records, announce what we'd just played (artist AND title), play a public-service announcement or two, read any community-event bulletins we might have in the notebook, and then start the excitement all over again by playing three more records.
One day, I stumbled on an album by an artist I'd never heard of before: Sandy Owen. Now, Sandy's music is never going to be confused with Metallica, but it was a refreshing change of pace for me. I found myself tapping my fingers on the board while the song was playing. Suddenly being a Samford DJ wasn't as boring as it had been. Sandy's music was pretty good, and it perked me up.
So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to do something amazingly radical. The album didn't have any clues as to Sandy's gender - no photos, no liner notes, nothing like that. So when the song ended, I cued my mike and said (in my Official Radio DJ Voice), "That was 'Boogie Woogie Rhythm and Blues' by Sandy Owen. And Sandy's the object of our next contest here at WVSU. If you know what gender Sandy is, be the first caller at our hotline. Get the answer right, and you'll win this official WVSU pencil I'm holding in my hand right now."
I was kinda tickled at myself, and got even more tickled a minute later when a guy called in (a listener! To my radio show! Imagine that!) and said Sandy was male. I said, "Are you sure?" and he said, "Well, I don't know him personally or anything, but I've got an album of his with his picture on it." I told the guy he'd won my pencil, and he laughed and said it was okay, he didn't want it. On my next mike break, I let the listeners know we'd had a winner in the contest, and that Sandy was male.
Well. This apparently caused all sorts of havoc with the station manager, who was an overweight bearded guy with long, stringy hair. Think Comic-Book Guy from The Simpsons. He was a volunteer (as were we all; WVSU wasn't a paying gig), about 40 years old, and he absolutely LOVED jazz. He listened to the station even when he wasn't there, which was a foreign concept to us DJs.
He called me during the next three-record set and chewed me a new one. "We aren't licensed to run contests! We could get in trouble with the FCC! You have no idea of the trouble you may have just caused us! We might get our license revoked!"
As a 20-year-old guy, I was usually easily cowed by authority. Somehow, though, I knew this wasn't the time to Take Things Seriously. "Tell you what, Jeff," I said (not his real name, because I don't want to embarrass him while telling this story; his real name was Steve Dennison), "if the FCC calls and wants to shut us down, throw me under the bus and tell them it was my fault. Better yet, let me talk to them. I'll tell them you specifically ordered me not to have a Sandy Owen Gender Contest on the air and I willfully disobeyed you."
Jeff sputtered a bit more, said something about "dire consequences" and whatnot, and then hung up. I finished out my shift and then went downstairs to the office of the Dean of Mass Communications, who taught most of my classes. I told him Jeff might be calling him about a contest I'd run on the air to discover the gender of Sandy Owen. He blinked at me five times, slowly, and said, "Don't worry about it." As I was leaving, he said, "Who's Sandy Owen?"
There are things that are serious in life - the death of a loved one, federal prison, censure by the FCC, SEC football - and then there's everything else. Don't mistake one for the other. As the great philosopher Aristotle said, "Don't take life too seriously. None of us get out of it alive. Now, pull my finger."
(c) 2013 John Puckett
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